Going Nowhere: Oceanic Im/Mobilities in North American Refugee Fiction

Abstract

In philosophy and theory, the terms flight and territorialization are tightly connected to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Through “lines of flight”—unpredictable routes defying spatial control—they conceptualize the breakup of a hegemonic spatial semantics through the mobility of the nomad. These lines make the paths of “deterritorialization,” contravening normative spatial structures (“striated” space) and producing “smooth space” that escapes structuration and control. Postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak have held Deleuzian philosophy accountable for reaffirming a universal (white male) subject, but rarely debate lines of flight and deterritorialization, which appear somewhat romantic if applied to refugees subjected to involuntarily deterritorialization. In my essay, I ask how literature can perform the work of a conceptual corrective to such blind spots by reading Edwidge Danticat’s 1991 short story “Children of the Sea” and the novel Dogs at the Perimeter by the Chinese-Malaysian Canadian Madeleine Thien (2011). Danticat’s story focuses on the Haitian “boat people” that attempted to reach Florida shores in the 1980s and 1990s, while Thien examines the Cambodian genocide and its consequences for the children that came to Canada as refugees. Both texts, I argue, articulate what Achille Mbembe has called the necropolitics of genocide and demographic control and perform a grueling critique of the necropolitical structures that continue to produce transoceanic death.